Why We Run: Justin Sanchez
Justin Sanchez is a Bronx native running to represent District 14 on the New York City Council.
What sparked you to decide to run this year?
I was born, raised and educated here in the Bronx and for the past 20 years our community has had a complete lack of leadership. There’s a complete lack of community engagement from our current City Council member and we can see that from the state of our community boards. In the last month and a half, we’ve had over 15 members drop out of our community board and our community is about to go through a massive rezoning and that means developers are going to come in and reshape the entire landscape of what our community looks like.
Right now, an average family of four here in the Bronx makes $34,000 a year in my neighborhood. Our number one problem is our rent burden. Over 60% of residents here pay more than a third of their annual salary to rent. That’s why I’m running: Because we need the leadership to remember that a public servant is someone that actually is beholden solely to their residents, solely to their community, and I will fight everyday to make sure that the community is put first — not the developers and the real estate company and everyone else that wants to come in for a piece of the pie, but the people that are worried where their next paycheck is going to come from.
I’m running to make sure that we’re bringing in local jobs with this rezoning that’s about to happen in the community. [I’m running to] make sure that when they bring in these developers, all these new construction jobs are union jobs that are going to local workers first. Further than that, I want to make sure that we’re bringing in great worker cooperatives which allows people to not only get a paycheck but to start accumulating wealth. You can’t really accumulate wealth if you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, and if you bring in these worker cooperatives, it leads to the path of having a piece of the pie, a part of that business.
Moving beyond that, we’re facing massive federal budget cuts to our public housing, so we need to be preserving our public housing. We need to fight homelessness. Right now in the state of New York, we have the highest rate of homelessness ever in our history, and we have the highest rate of homelessness in the city in our history. We need to implement a pipeline from shelters to permanent housing and that involves instituting supportive housing, making sure that individuals with mental health problems and families out on their luck are getting the support they need to move their families into permanent housing so that they can achieve their American dream.
And finally none of this will get done without organizing our community. I’m sick and tired of having our politicians come around here only when there’s a vote. The fun fact is that my apartment building where I’m running my office is on the same block as my City Councilman’s district office, yet no one on our block, or on the surrounding blocks, knows who he is or what he does. I want to be the person that implements a community task force that will ensure that our residents are getting the most up-to-date information on what’s happening in the community, not only when we need votes but all year round.
How do you think your campaign is going?
I feel like my campaign is going absolutely amazing. Two weeks before I started my campaign I was a server at a restaurant. I those two weeks, we raised over $17,000.
Wow.
I’m a publicly funded candidate. I don’t take money from any corporations. I get all of my funds from real people and because I do that the city will then match all of my New York City contributions up to $175. When you factor that in, my campaign is sitting well over $70,000, once we finish ticking off those final little check marks that we need to confirm our matching funds. So for a little server in New York City, we’re doing pretty well.
What are you enjoying most about campaigning? What have you learned or what has surprised you about your community?
I guess it’s not surprising, but it’s how disengaged many of the community members are. As I said before, I’m on the same block as the district office for the City Council member and my local community board meets only three blocks away.
I come from a field background. I’ve been working on a campaigns since I was 15 years old, knocking on doors for Democrats and now when I’ve been knocking on doors in my neighborhood specifically it’s just shocking to see so many people have no idea what’s happening blocks away from their house. It’s not because they don’t want to know but it’s because you know no one has tried to engage them. That’s what’s been the most surprising. I’m able to engage people that have never had someone knock on their door.
And when they do invite you into their homes, are you discovering even more support for the issues you intend to advocate for? Or, do they bring up issues that weren’t on your personal radar?
There is something that has surprised me. Even though we’re all Democrats, called the Bible Belt of the Bronx. I’m Hispanic and a lot of Hispanics are really devout Catholics and they pay very close attention to the Bible. My current City Council member is a pastor and during his last election, he posted a video of himself praising the anti-LGBT laws passed in Uganda. Laws that call for people like me to be executed just for the idea that they might be gay. My City Council member put up a video supporting this law, and that’s really reflective of the sentiment, or so I thought, of how people viewed gay people in the neighborhood.
Because I grew up with those same kind of feelings from the older Hispanic generation. The lack of acceptance. That’s why I didn’t come out of the closet until three years ago, and now I’m an openly LGBT man running against a very openly anti-LGBT incumbent. And the thing that I found most surprising about this is that a lot of the neighborhood hasn’t heard the rhetoric that he is uses against the LGBT community, and in a community that’s called the Bible Belt of the Bronx, to have people get engaged and feel something when you talk about his anti-LGBT rhetoric, about how bad that is, to hear those words coming out of residents who are extremely devout Catholics, the older generation that has never been that accepting before… that is something that has blown me away and really has added more fuel the fire. Things like this are accepted here in New York City, and it’s wonderful that you can now see the progression from my grandparents back in the day to now.
Have you run into any pushback being a young person running for office?
Actually that’s been one of the most surprising things. A lot of people bring up the fact that I am young and instead of it being a downside it’s a plus. The thing that I hear most often is, “We’re so excited for a fresh face.” When I’m talking to seniors at senior centers, they are overwhelmed to see someone young running for office and they’re excited and they are happy to see some fresh blood, some fresh faces out there with the new ideas and they’re not radical ideas they’re just common sense solutions to 21st century problems.
As you’re looking ahead, is there any obstacle you see? What do you want to do better at or more of?
I want to continue engaging with this community. One of the biggest statistics to me that really blows my mind, and I try to tell everyone I speak to about it, is that my neighborhood has 166,000 people in it. Out of those 166,000 thousand people, we have over 100,000 registered voters. Yet when an election year comes around, even this [past] year, only roughly 9,000 of those people go out to vote. In New York, we don’t have automatic voter registration. People have to sign up to vote and over 100,000 of our residents signed up to vote.
But you can’t tell me that 90,000 people don’t care or give a damn about their neighborhood. That’s just not true. What that says is that there’s a complete disconnect between the community leadership and the community residents and if I can do anything for this community — win or lose — if I can bring out even 20,000 people to vote, rather than that 9,000 that came out last time, I think that would be a victory for the community and for the campaign.
What resource or piece of advice you’ve found through Run for Something has helped you most?
The Slack community has been awesome because you can feel out different ideas and people always come back to you with new ideas. It’s also a great way, as a candidate myself, to see what other candidates are going through. I love when people ask policy questions, or how different fundraising things are going, and I love being able to share any knowledge that I have so that I can learn from everyone else. As a candidate, you always have to be learning and being able to bring that knowledge to my team, it just opens the whole game.
If people want to volunteer or contribute to your campaign, what’s the best way to do that?
Donations. Donations. Donations. We have a huge race on our hands and we’re trying to take out an incumbent. It’s not easy for anyone, but the best way to really help out with the campaign is to donate on our website: www.electsanchez.com. New York City donors are our number one resource. Anyone from all over the world can donate, but New York City donations mean so much more because as a publicly funded candidate, any New York City donor’s donation gets matched six to one, up to $175. So a $175 donation from someone in New York City actually is a $1,225 donation because of matching funds. Every dollar counts when it comes to local New York City politics, because every dollar is seven dollars.
